Sunday, March 05, 2006

Synchronicity? Serendipity? Pure magnetics? Hippie-ism?

Recently I was turned on to an intelligent fantasy series, by writer Robin Hobb. I'm almost finished with the third in this first trilogy (The Farseer trilogy), called Assassin's Quest. I like these books very, very much. The fantasy is very subtle, not overly done and reads more like historical fiction than anything. As I've been reading, I started noticing similarities to the work of a client of mine who has written (and is still writing) a series of fantasy books that I think are very good and deserve to be published. I edited this client's work long before I ever came across Hobb, but suddenly it occurred to me to ask this client if she had ever heard of Hobb. It turns out she had, indeed and I was not crazy to find tiny echoes--nods, if you will--to Hobb's work in my client's. I felt rather smart for making the connection. Then, today I find a blog entry by someone else who has just begun reading Hobb.

Oh I know, this doesn't seem like much, but I have had other, more powerful episodes of synchronicity that illustrate what I've referred to before as The Law of Attraction. That which you focus on begins to draw to you other things that "share" the same "vibration." I know how it sounds, but to me, it's physics, not new-age self-help.

Recently I finished the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, by Philip Pullman in which his characters endeavor to understand the meaning of "dust" a substance which seems to give and have life and is possibly dark matter. Pullman bases all his fantasy work on real physics, and his books are as much a quest to understand the nature of the universe as they are a treatise on adolescence. They are truly marvelous books. Just after finishing the third of the series, I read Ayelet Waldman's new book right after, and lo, the main character's stepson is a fan of Pullman's books. Then I discovered they're making a movie of the first of Pullman's book...all this happened one step after the other.

Wilder things have happened though. This summer I began thinking of my friend Whitney, who moved to the East Coast two years ago, and whom I hadn't kept in the best of touch with, but I really missed. I kept thinking I saw her on the street, only to realize these lookalikes were not her. Well in late July, my friend Emily, who was, herself, moving to New York took me to a cafe in town that I never visit, and minutes after we ordered, in walked my friend Whitney. We would never have met if not for being there that day, since the one mutual friend we have in town told her that he thought I had moved (I didn't) so she didn't come by my house.

When you put enough focus on something you really do attract it, or hints of it, or things like it. It again proves to me that if you apply this same logic to the larger things in your life, that which you really want, they too can start to accumulate and move towards you in time. They may not show up right away, but focusing on the idea that you will have them is better than focusing on the idea that you don't have them.

Or else I write these posts just so my brother-in-law can have a reason to continue to refer to me as a "hippie." I'd hate to disappoint him.